Speaking with Hands: Photographs from the Buhl Collection

In October 1993, Henry M. Buhl purchased a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz
of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands. This photograph would come to be the
cornerstone of a private collection that now includes over one thousand
images by the medium’s foremost practitioners as well as little-known
and emerging artists. Focusing on the theme of the hand, Buhl has
gathered images spanning the history of photography, from a photogenic
drawing negative made in 1840 by William Henry Fox Talbot to serial
Polaroids made in 2002 by Cornelia Parker. The collection also
encompasses a comprehensive range of photographic practices, including
scientific, journalistic, and fine-art photography, with a strong
component of contemporary art.

Published on the occasion of a
major exhibition drawn from The Buhl Collection, this book demonstrates
the prevalence of the hand as a photographic theme, a result, in part,
of photography’s easy ability to capture fragments and detail, as well
as ephemeral movement. The selected works depict the hand literally, in
the context of portraiture, for example, as well as figuratively, in
terms of the poetic emphasis given to hand gestures in documentary
images. In artistic images created from the 1920s to the present, the
hand is abstracted and subsequently treated as a conceptual device.

Jennifer
Blessing explores the nature of collecting photographs and why hands
are in many ways a uniquely photographic theme. Kirsten A. Hoving
emphasizes the prevalence of hands in Surrealist photographs and prose.
Ralph Rugoff discusses the uncanny aspects of hands in contemporary art
that uses photography. The catalogue entries, written by Matthew S.
Witkovsky with Melanie Mariño and Nat Trotman, cover 150 artists and 168
works, forming a useful resource for the study of the history of
photography.